Friday, February 10, 2017

CRISPR/Cas9 gene-editing technology has been used for the first time to successfully produce live cows with increased resistance to bovine tuberculosis, reports new research published in the open access journal Genome Biology.

The researchers, from the College of Veterinary Medicine, Northwest A&F University in Shaanxi, China, used a modified version of the CRISPR gene-editing technology to insert a new gene into the cow genome with no detected off target effects on the animals genetics (a common problem when creating transgenic animals using CRISPR).

Dr Yong Zhang, lead author of the research, said: "We used a novel version of the CRISPR system called CRISPR/Cas9n to successfully insert a tuberculosis resistance gene, called NRAMP1, into the cow genome. We were then able to successfully develop live cows carrying increased resistance to tuberculosis. Importantly, our method produced no off target effects on the cow genetics meaning that the CRISPR technology we employed may be better suited to producing transgenic livestock with purposefully manipulated genetics."

While the existence of a buried ocean sandwiched between surface ice and high-pressure (HP) polymorphs of ice emerges as the most plausible structure for the hundreds-of-kilometers thick hydrospheres within large icy moons of the Solar System (Ganymede, Callisto, Titan), little is known about the thermal structure of the deep HP ice mantle and its dynamics, possibly involving melt production and extraction. This has major implications for the thermal history of these objects as well as on the habitability of their ocean as the HP ice mantle is presumed to limit chemical transport from the rock component to the ocean. Here, we describe 3D spherical simulations of subsolidus thermal convection tailored to the specific structure of the HP ice mantle of large icy moons. Melt production is monitored and melt transport is simplified by assuming instantaneous extraction to the ocean above. The two controlling parameters for these models are the rheology of ice VI and the heat flux from the rock core. Reasonable end-members are considered for both parameters as disagreement remains on the former (especially the pressure effect on viscosity) and as the latter is expected to vary significantly during the moon’s history. We show that the heat power produced by radioactive decay within the rock core is mainly transported through the HP ice mantle by melt extraction to the ocean, with most of the melt produced directly above the rock/water interface. While the average temperature in the bulk of the HP ice mantle is always relatively cool when compared to the value at the interface with the rock core (∼ 5 K above the value at the surface of the HP ice mantle), maximum temperatures at all depths are close to the melting point, often leading to the interconnection of a melt path via hot convective plume conduits throughout the HP ice mantle. Overall, we predict long periods of time during these moons’ history where water generated in contact with the rock core is transported to the above ocean.

The CO2 level in Mars' primitive atmosphere 3.5 billion years ago was too low for sediments, such as those found by NASA's Curiosity exploration vehicle in areas like the Gale Crater on the planet's equator, to be deposited. This and other conclusions are drawn from a paper written with the participation of researchers from the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) and published in the latest issue of the journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

The area Curiosity has been analysing since 2012, as part of NASA's Mars Science Laboratory mission, is composed primarily of sedimentary sequences deposited at the bottom of a lake 3.5 billion years ago. These sediments contain various secondary minerals, such as clays or sulphates, which indicate that the primitive surface was in contact with liquid water.

The existence of liquid water requires a warm surface temperature brought about by a minimum content of CO2 in the atmosphere. Yet this was not the case with Mars in its beginnings. "This contradiction has two possible solutions. Either we have not yet developed climatic models which explain the environmental conditions on Mars at the beginning of its history, or the Gale sedimentary sequences really did form in a very cold climate. The second option is the most reasonable", explains CSIC researcher Alberto Fairén, who works at the Centre for Astrobiology near Madrid (a joint centre run by CSIC and Spain's National Institute of Aerospace Technology).

[...]

"However, the rover has not found carbonates, thereby confirming the results of studies by all previous probes: carbonates are very scarce on the surface of Mars and, therefore, the CO2 level in the atmosphere was very low", adds. Fairén.

The WaPo claimed Russian hackers compromised a vermont electrical grid. However, the WaPo semi retracted stating computers at the electrical system were compromised, but not the electrical grid itself.

Thieves are pretending to be soldiers seeking love online and Hamas duped Israeli soldiers, hacking their phones, by pretending to be attractive women. Remember the old tshirt: on the internet, no one knows you're a dog.

The Amazonian rainforest was transformed over two thousand years ago by ancient people who built hundreds of large, mysterious earthworks.

Findings by Brazilian and UK experts provide new evidence for how indigenous people lived in the Amazon before European people arrived in the region.

The ditched enclosures, in Acre state in the western Brazilian Amazon, were concealed for centuries by trees. Modern deforestation has allowed the discovery of more than 450 of these large geometrical geoglyphs.

The function of these mysterious sites is still little understood - they are unlikely to be villages, since archaeologists recover very few artefacts during excavation. The layout doesn't suggest they were built for defensive reasons. It is thought they were used only sporadically, perhaps as ritual gathering places.

The structures are ditched enclosures that occupy roughly 13,000 km2. Their discovery challenges assumptions that the rainforest ecosystem has been untouched by humans.

A trackway of a small hopping mammaliform trackmaker from the Jinju Formation (Lower Cretaceous) of the Jinju City area, Korea, is the first of this type reported from the Mesozoic of Asia, and globally. The animal left a narrow trackway (∼20 mm wide) with small tetradactyl footprints averaging less than 10 mm in diameter. Only two footprints registered with each hop (mean length 41 mm) thus indicating a bipedal gait. All trackway evidence suggests a small “mouse-like” trackmaker. Previous reports of trackways made by hopping tetrapods from the Mesozoic are rare and presently restricted to ichnogenus Ameghinichnus isp. indet., from the Jurassic of Argentina. Ichnogenus Musaltipes from the Cenozoic of North America, is the only other ichnogenus representing a hopping mammal. The Korean specimen here named Koreasaltipes jinjuensis, is different from these aforementioned ichnogenera in digit count, digit proportion and trackway configuration, as well as lack of tail trace. Koreasaltipes jinjuensis is from a lake shore paleoenvironment associated with nematode tracks (Cochlichnus isp.), other small tetrapod tracks attributed to avian theropods (birds), pterosaurs and crocodylomorphs, as well as larger saurischian dinosaurs.

The Ediacaran skeletal tubular putative metazoan Cloudina occurs globally in carbonate settings, which both provided lithified substrates and minimized the cost of skeletonization. Habitat and substrate preferences and the relationship of Cloudina to other metazoans have not been fully documented, so we know little as to its ecological demands or community dynamics. In situ Cloudina from the Nama Group, Namibia (ca. 550–541 Ma), formed mutually attached reefs composed of successive assemblages in shallow, high-energy environments, and also communities attached to either stromatolites in storm-influenced deep inner-ramp settings or thin microbial mats in lower-energy habitats. Each assemblage shows statistically distinct tube diameter cohorts, but in sum, Cloudina shows an exponential frequency distribution of diameter size. In reefs, we document a periodicity of size variation, where mean, minimum, and maximum tube diameters vary together and show a systematic increase toward the top of each assemblage. We conclude that most Nama Group Cloudina represent one ecologically generalist taxon with highly variable size, that size was environmentally mediated, and that Cloudina could respond rapidly to periodic environmental changes. While Nama Group skeletal metazoans coexisted with soft-bodied biota, there was no apparent ecological interaction, as they were segregated into lithified carbonate and non-lithified clastic microbial mat communities, respectively. We infer that ecological flexibility allowed Cloudina to form varied communities that colonized diverse carbonate substrates under low levels of interspecific substrate competition. This is in notable contrast to the earliest Cambrian skeletal epibenthos that formed biodiverse reef communities with specialist niche occupancy.

Between Jan. 23 and 27, 2017, there were reports that Syrian president Bashar Al Assad had suffered a stroke and had to be hospitalized. The usually pro-Assad British newspaper The Independent claimed that the Syrian president was suffering serious psychological strain.

Allegations of a president’s poor health take on extra significance in a Russian proxy state. During the Cold War, the Soviets frequently cited allied leaders’ purported medical and psychological problems when launching military interventions — takeovers, essentially — in the countries of the supposedly-ailing heads of state.

You’ve probably heard that China’s military has developed a “carrier-killer” ballistic missile to threaten one of America’s premier power-projection tools, its unmatched fleet of aircraft carriers. Or perhaps you’ve read about China’s deployment of its own aircraft carrier to the Taiwan Strait and South China Sea. But heavily defended moving targets like aircraft carriers would be a challenge to hit in open ocean, and were China’s own aircraft carrier (or even two or three like it) to venture into open water in anger, the U.S. submarine force would make short work of it. In reality, the greatest military threat to U.S. vital interests in Asia may be one that has received somewhat less attention: the growing capability of China’s missile forces to strike U.S. bases. This is a time of increasing tension, with China’s news organizations openly threatening war. U.S. leaders and policymakers should understand that a preemptive Chinese missile strike against the forward bases that underpin U.S. military power in the Western Pacific is a very real possibility, particularly if China believes its claimed core strategic interests are threatened in the course of a crisis and perceives that its attempts at deterrence have failed. Such a preemptive strike appears consistent with available information about China’s missile force doctrine, and the satellite imagery shown below points to what may be real-world efforts to practice its execution

Some are saying this is a test of the new Trump administration to see what he will do. Others are suggesting Trump has already abandoned Ukraine in favor of Russia and Putin has already been given the green light to cause Ukraine to collapse and take it over.

Some have been saying the fighting was going to be a second Debaltseve. The Russian artillery has definitely been pounding

Monday, February 06, 2017

I raced after the Awknerds. The complete embarrassment of their serenade still turned by ear tips bright red. And now I was going to get my vengeance. And they were going to stop. NOW.

And poor Aitan was going to stop being tormented too, but that was a secondary benefit, not why I was doing this.

I had put away my needler when I started running. It would have been awkward to run with it. I am twelve after all and if I had tripped and accidentally fired the needler by pulling on the trigger. I'd never run with my finger inside the trigger guard. That would be a recipe for disaster!

Every kid on Jefferson starting at the age of six gets a training course on how to use a needler. At age 8, every kid gets one. We practice every day. Needlers are small guns of a sort, really airguns, that use pressurized air to fire one of several types of needle at a target. Most ammo is the sort to knock out a Jefflife critter without killing it. A tranquilizer dart, really, we call a trankle. There is another type that makes a loud bang noise, a bangle. This is meant to scare away animals too, but can be a bit dangerous. Finally, there is a dart for Earthlife, too. But you are not given that until you are 18. My needler carries bangles and trankles.

Needlers are necessary tools on Jefferson. While most Jefflife leaves humans alone, there are critters that are very territorial. If you stumbled across a family of Thunder Pigs, you would be in trouble if they charged and lacked something to do. That's just bad luck. However, there are types of Jefflife that seem to be very offended by us being here. Most are not local to Shadwell. However, one type is.

Yoats are medium sized pack hunters. They howl, but in a cacophonous yowl that would offend the least picky coyote on Earth. They eat small Jefflife critters but seem to absoultely hate humans. They are not intelligent like a person or even a dog, but they are dangerous. They smell a lone person and they can hunt that person down. A Yoat wouldn't attack an adult, but when you're a kid, they are a danger.

Almost right after Shadwell was founded, they killed a kid, or so we are told, called Kenny.

So all kids older than 8 carried a needler and most adults, too.

I PROMISE, I didn't shoot any of the awknerds.

As I said and meant, no awknerds were harmed - by me! - in this adventure.

However, because I am a much better runner, than any of the awknerds, I nearly caught up to them and then stopped. Puffing a bit, I just ran fast! Sheesh! I pulled out my needler. I took aim...and...

Rosa, via her little Immie camera, screamed in my ear.

I had a bangle loaded and her scream made me jump: I hadn't noticed her Immie cam flying next to me. THAT nearly made me drop the needler. Fortunately, my finger was not on the trigger. It would not have been: pointing a needler at someone is really dangerous. Every kid knows that. It would have gotten me in trouble. I had been aiming above their heads, but when Rosa freaked, I jerked and had my finger been on the trigger I’d have nearly shot the dirt near the last of Aitan's jerk friends.

I screamed at Rosa and proceeded to fire a half dozen bangles in the air above the fleeing villains.

BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!

The twins Kyle and Karen screamed. Aneiren wet his pants I heard later. Cadman shrieked with joy. He was going to be a problem later, I knew, but the others were cowed.

Except I didn’t really. What? You think I am that crazy and reckless!?! Shame on you!

I told you we all have boosters, right? The little computers that talk to the implants in our brains allowing us to control machinery around us. Remember?

Good.

I also told you I am a member of the Merry Pranksters.

You can do simple social math, right? Well, we’d hacked the Awknerds’ boosters a while ago. They loved tinkering with their boosters and even building custom ones. We happened to stumble across their oopses and found a way in. We’d planned on using it for a grand prank. Maybe make every Awknerd see a dancing banana instead of the teacher at school or some such. We had not decided as a group.

Well, I decided to just outright use the backdoor, the way into their boosters, to end my and Aitan’s obnoxious little tormentations. The Awknerds heard and saw the bangles going off around them. Their boosters were feeding in the sounds and sights to their brain. They, in their excitement and then fear, couldn’t tell the difference. Or so I hoped. I think I was right. I was worrid about Cadman though. He might have figured out what was happening.

I holstered my needler, unfired and safe from getting in trouble, at least that way, from the adults and parents. I quickly returned to chasing them and I yelled at the top of my lungs.

I ran down the last part of the hill and chased them into the forest. They decided they were going to lose me through trees. If what we had could really be called trees. Anyways, they put those big trunks between me and them.

I followed though pretty easily: they really needed to put down the VR goggles and get outside more.

We ran for what seemed like forever, really 20 minutes, when Kyle tripped and fell. Karen stopped to help him up and when she saw me, she surrendered. Kyle was sprawled out and dazed, so I helped her get him up. I made them both promise the humiliation of Aitan and I was over.

I made it VERY clear if they continued, they would really, REALLY regret it. My friends and I were known as the Merry Pranksters for a reason and they did NOT want to get into a Prank War. The last clique who attempted that still had their dogs dyed hot pink two years later.

When we got Kyle up, we noticed what he'd tripped over.

It was a helmet.

A combat helmet, like the sort my uncle Fred would have worn in battle.

Friday, February 03, 2017

Here we explore the hypothesis that certain domes on Europa may have been produced by the extrusion of viscous cryolavas. A new mathematical method for the emplacement and relaxation of viscous lava domes is presented and applied to putative cryovolcanic domes on Europa. A similarity solution approach is applied to the governing equation for fluid flow in a cylindrical geometry, and dome relaxation is explored assuming a volume of cryolava has been rapidly emplaced onto the surface. Nonphysical singularities inherent in previous models for dome relaxation have been eliminated, and cryolava cooling is represented by a time-variable viscosity. We find that at the onset of relaxation, bulk kinematic viscosities may lie in the range between 103 and 106 m2/s, while the actual fluid lava viscosity may be much lower. Plausible relaxation times to form the domes, which are linked to bulk cryolava rheology, are found to range from 3.6 days to 7.5 years. We find that cooling of the cryolava, while dominated by conduction through an icy skin, should not prevent fluids from advancing and relaxing to form domes within the timescales considered. Determining the range of emplacement conditions for putative cryolava domes will shed light on Europa's resurfacing history. In addition, the rheologies and compositions of erupted cryolavas have implications for subsurface cryomagma ascent and local surface stress conditions on Europa.

A year ago, last January, Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown lit up the Internet with their dossier of evidence for Planet Nine. Their conclusion was electrifying: An as-yet undetected super-Earth may be lurking a light week away in an eccentric orbit far beyond Neptune. Their article in the Astronomical Journal generated intense interest, including 311,371 (and counting) downloads of a .pdf containing a bracing dose of secular perturbation theory, along with push notifications from the likes of the New York Times and NPR to devices worldwide.

We present an analysis of two concentrically-fractured depressions on Mars, one in northern Hellas and the second in Galaxias Fossae. Volumetric measurements indicate that ∼2.4 km3 and ∼0.2 km3 of material was removed in order to form the North Hellas and Galaxias depressions. The removed material is inferred to be predominantly water ice. Calorimetric estimates suggest that up to ∼103–105 m3 of magma would have been required to melt/sublimate such a volume of ice under an ice/magma interaction scenario. This process would lead to subsidence and cracking of the surface, which could produce the observed concentric fracture (crevasse-like) morphology. While the Galaxias Fossae landform morphology is consistent with an impact origin, the large volume of removed material in North Hellas is less consistent with an impact origin and is interpreted to have resulted from volcanic melting of ice. The possibility of liquid water formation during or subsequent to volcanism or an impact could generate locally-enhanced habitable conditions, making these features tantalizing geological and astrobiological exploration targets.

With climate change in our own era becoming increasingly evident, it's natural to wonder how our ancestors may have dealt with similar environmental circumstances. New research methods and technologies are able to shed light on climate patterns that took place thousands of years ago, giving us a new perspective on how cultures of the time coped with variable and changing environments.

A new article in the February issue of Current Anthropology explores the dynamics of adaptation and resilience in the face of a diverse and varied environmental context, using the case study of South Asia's Indus Civilization (c.3000-1300 BC). Integrating research carried out as part of the Land, Water and Settlement project -- part of an ongoing collaboration between the University of Cambridge and Banaras Hindu University -- that worked in northwest India between 2007 and 2014, the article looks at how Indus populations in north-west India interacted with their environment, and considers how that environment changed during periods of climate change.

Modern-day periodic climate pattern variations related to solar activity are well known. High-resolution records such as varves, ice cores, and tree-ring sequences are commonly used for reconstructing climatic variations in the younger geological history. For the first time we apply dendrochronological methods to Paleozoic trees in order to recognize annual variations. Large woody tree trunks from the early Permian Fossil Forest of Chemnitz, southeast Germany, show a regular cyclicity in tree-ring formation. The mean ring curve reveals a 10.62 yr cyclicity, the duration of which is almost identical to the modern 11 yr solar cycle. Therefore, we speculate and further discuss that, like today, sunspot activity caused fluctuations of cosmic radiation input to the atmosphere, affecting cloud formation and annual rates of precipitation, which are reflected in the tree-ring archive. This is the earliest record of sunspot cyclicity and simultaneously demonstrates its long-term stable periodicity for at least 300 m.y.

Researchers have identified traces of what they believe is the earliest known prehistoric ancestor of humans -- a microscopic, bag-like sea creature, which lived about 540 million years ago.

Named Saccorhytus, after the sack-like features created by its elliptical body and large mouth, the species is new to science and was identified from microfossils found in China. It is thought to be the most primitive example of a so-called "deuterostome" -- a broad biological category that encompasses a number of sub-groups, including the vertebrates.

If the conclusions of the study, published in the journal Nature, are correct, then Saccorhytus was the common ancestor of a huge range of species, and the earliest step yet discovered on the evolutionary path that eventually led to humans, hundreds of millions of years later.

Russia will maintain a military stronghold in Syria for at least the next 49 years, after the two nations signed an agreement allowing Russian ships to port in Tartus. This is Russia’s foothold in the Middle East, and yet another example of how the country is expanding its military power globally.

The Sarmat program that is expected to produce a new "heavy" ICBM, appears to have hit some kind of a bump. Of course, it's hard to know it for certain--these things don't get a lot of coverage--but there are a few signs that may suggest that the program is in some kind of trouble.